Stress makes you see things that aren’t there

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I could spend a lot of time talking about stress.  I have been through the ringer more than once with sick animals, job loss, sickness and a lot more trouble.  Rather than bore you with the countless details of my troubles (waaaaaaaah) let me give you the lesson.  Stress does not help you to solve problems.

Stress creates a lens to look through

One thing stress does better than anything else is create a lens for you to look through… it gives you a way of seeing.  In this sense it creates plans for, determines your future for you, makes the day worse and creates templates for you to believe in.  Life’s funny.  You don’t know what you are capable of until you are put under pressure.   When the pressure comes it makes you think and see things a certain way.  It gives you a lens to see through.  This results in you seeing only ‘doom and gloom’.

What I have learned from stress is that it gives you this way of thinking while you are under pressure.  That is, it creates a template for you to think through while you are under the hammer.  How about this:

1. There is a housing crisis on:  you think, “I won’t get a house”.

2. My husband is home late: you think, “that he is having an affair.”

3. The financial crisis: you think, “that all you have done is gone.”

4. My boss is firing people: you think, “that you are next”.

I could go on for hours.  The point is when pressure comes we are prone to think and act in ways that provoke wrong thinking habits in us.  Just because there is talk of layoffs at work doesn’t mean you are going to be fired.  Sure it could, but why paint the worst picture?

Don’t let yourself make major decisions when stressed

I have made a million poor choices when the heat is on.  I have felt the sting of stress and acted under the belief that I had to act at that point in time because the pressure demanded it.  The result of that was a disaster! I have learned just recently that most of the stress we create is because of personal insecurity.  We expect bad things to happen to us because our self-image is so poor that we have come to think there is no other alternative.  We blame others for own problems, we create ‘hidden secret agendas’ where there are none and worst of all we tell other people that the same thing is going to happen to them!

Scholar Karl Weick once noted in his work on sense-making that in high times of stress people will often create default belief patterns in order to make something up for themselves to hang on to.  That is, we will believe something because we think we have to in order to survive.  Other times I believe the opposite is also true.  We create ‘false realities’ for ourselves because we simply must believe that bad things are going to happen.  Stress causes you to think this way.  When pressure comes, and it does to all of us, the temptation is to believe the worst.  In reality, the situation is probably not that bad.  And if it is that bad, you can get through it with the right support.

If you have to make decisions when stressed take advice from cool headed people

One of the temptations for stressed people is to find validation of beliefs through others who share the same views.  Let me ask you this, would you ask a disgruntled employee for advice on how good a company is performing?  Go outside the box.  Speak to someone who has a cool head and no emotional investment in the situation.  They will give you clear guidance and show you often that the stress you feel is something that you have created through your own engagement with the problem at hand.  Quite often because they are ‘out of the box’ they will give you advice that makes sense, is in context and helps somewhat.  Then again they may not.  But I guarantee you this: find a cool head and you will find a cool answer.

In finishing this post I want to remind you that life is fairly stressful at times.  So much so, that pressure destroys lives and marriages.  Stress is a killer.  However, what we need to recognise is that stress creates patterns in our mind.  It gives us templates to think through.  Don’t give in to the ’stress’ way of thinking.  There are situations that demand our attention like: paying the rent, paying bills, keeping up with our jobs and so on.  Life is tough.  However, we make it so much worse when we begin to let that stress take over our lives and invade our personal thinking patterns.   I have been in situations where I couldn’t pay my rent… it was stressful.  It wasn’t at all helpful to allow that pressure to steal my hopes for the future or ruin my life.  I had to believe that something good was going to happen even when it looked utterly hopeless.  It was this expectation of something better that helped me in those low times.  It still helps, while I look towards the hope of owning a home.

I want to encourage you to think about the areas of stress in your life and to recognise what is the real pressure and what it is that you have made up because of fear.  Think about it… it will help you to do so!

This post is an entry into the Middle Zone Musings What I learned from Stress group writing project.

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